GMail Drive is a nifty piece of software that lets you use the voluminous space Google offers through its email service as a virtual file system. Using GMail Drive is simple, and it walks and talks just like a hard drive on your computer. After reading this article, you may join Kulvir Bhogal and retire your USB thumb drive, opting for this impressive online alternative.

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I tend to use my online email account as a way to store important files. I
just email the files to myself as attachments, and the files are available any
time I might need them. In short, I frequently use my email account as a
virtual drive (for lack of a better term).

When I first found out how much space Google offered for its Gmail service, I
was in awe. At the time of writing, Google was offering a whopping 2656 MB of
storage space. That’s right, more than 2.6 gigabytes of space! I tend to
get a lot of email, but not enough to even chink the armor of such a voluminous
amount of space.

Unfortunately, treating my email account as a virtual drive involves the
drill of my having to log into the account, creating a message, attaching the
desired files to the message, and then sending the message to me. This can be a
really time-consuming process.

In this article, I’ll introduce you to GMail Drive, a shell
namespace extension that lets you use its Gmail account on its Windows operating
system—just as if it were a real drive. GMail Drive is a free application,
making it all the more delectable. After finding out about the GMail Drive, I
have since retired my USB thumb drive, opting for the online alternative I will
introduce you to.

For this article, I am assuming that you have a Gmail account. At the time of
this article’s writing, Google requires that you provide the Gmail website
with your mobile phone number. Gmail will then send you an invitation code,
which is needed to create your Gmail account.

How GMail Drive Works (Behind the Scenes)

At first, the capability of GMail Drive to allow you to use its Gmail account
as a storage medium seems like magic. However, have you heard the saying that
magic is just an illusion? The adage certainly holds true for GMail Drive.
GMail Drive performs the same tedious work of creating an email message, attaching
a file, and sending the message to the email address that I talked about earlier.
The "magic" is that the GMail Drive application does all of the tedious
work for you. The email message representing a file on your GMail Drive can
be seen in your Gmail account Inbox folder. GMail Drive constantly checks your
email account behind the scenes (a daemon-like approach) to monitor changes
to the contents of your email drive.